I'm watching the show right now and I have to say I'm pretty impressed. Hell, I'm damn impressed. Major kudos to FSW! John Harkes is doing a pretty good job. He seems a natural for this thing. The production values on the replays are much more than I expected.
I'm enjoying the hell out of the show as well...but there's one thing I'm not enjoying. I just sent this e-mail to FSW and MLS: ----------------- Hello! I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am for the beginning of the eighth season of Major League Soccer. I can't help but believe this is the year my Columbus Crew will finally get over the top. I must commend MLS and its television partners for the terrific coverage the league will have this year. Between the Fox Sports World contract and the best $49 I spend every year, the Shootout package, I'll be in soccer heaven throughout the season. As I type this e-mail, I'm watching the debut of the MLS Wrap on Fox Sports World. It's a fantastic show - I'll definitely be watching all season. The one criticism I have of the show is the pre-voiced highlight packages of the games. To be perfectly blunt, it sounds like FSW had an intern voice the highlights. I'm finding myself cringing quite a bit listening to the "disembodied highlight voice". It's really not good. As I said, the show is terrific. It's a great way to end an MLS Saturday. But please let somebody else do the highlights. Thanks.
Interesting that they stole the EPL Review show's satellite intro to each match (Closing in on the stadiums). Or was that just a coincidence?
One more chance to see the 1st show Just in case anyone is interested: Sun Apr 13 07:30AM Pacific Sun Apr 13 08:30AM Mountain Sun Apr 13 09:30AM Central Sun Apr 13 10:30AM Eastern Length: 1 hr R FOX Sports World (US) MLS Wrap Major League Soccer (MLS) highlights
Argghh! Won't be able to see it this week. Maybe next. One other note. I loved, loved seeing post-game highlights after the DCU game. That's a first, I think. Thanks FSW and MLS for getting this together. It's finally looking as if televising games is a planned, thought out process instead of an afterthought.
The show is great. Plus the KC-DC game lasted 2.5 hours and showed post game comments from players. You don't see that from ESPN's "hurry up the game so we can go to the next program" coverage. Props to FSWfor this. Now I'm in Soccer Heaven.
I thought the show was a little rough ...but hey its their first show, its only going to get better. Someone needs to tie Sean's hand's together though..
Nice job. A few kinks, which I'm sure will be smoothed out for future episodes. Wheelock and Harkes had a good chemistry (though Wheelock shouldn't hunch forward like that), and I liked how they incorporated the regular FSW graphics (satellite, lineups, etc.) into the program. I generally don't like having music played over highlights, but that's nothing major.
It was good on mute. Highlights were extensive - all you need to see. Nice weekly show and shown at good times. I liked the rip-off of the Premiership preview show - with the sattelite image zoom in. Except there is a bit of a difference between zooming into places like Old Trafford and some HS field in Texas. I think I could see the cool kids smoking between classes when they zoomed into Dragons stadium.
Enjoyed the show, thought Harkes and Weelock could have done better homework on the players. During the lineup introductions you got the sense they were scanning the lineup for somebody they knew. Harkes always commenting on his former '94 teammates. They should take the approach that this show is for people pretty familiar with the league but who may not follow every move. When they introduced the Burn and you see DJ Countess at GK it would be a nice time to remind us what happened to Matt Jordan. Beginning of the season is a good time to comment on the big changes. ESPN seems to focus their commentary on players in the national team picture, it would be nice to see Fox spend more attention on the others.
Well they're definitely paying attention, and they are planning on rolling out some changes and improvements. I got a note from Sean and he definitely appreciates folks who are sending in feedback and constructive criticism. He told me to tell you to keep sending in the comments.
I liked how the football stadium zoom ins where taken when the stadium was set up for football instead of soccer.
I'm still hoping that they start plugging the ECG. Afterall, the latest issue has a wonderful interview with their boss.
Week 2: A few things: 1) There was one big problem on MLS Wrap last night: they ended everything at essentially the 48 minute mark. They came back from the last commercial break and essentially filled for 5 minutes and then ended the show at 55 minutes. That's pretty poor, even for a network which routinely fills airtime with its own promos. 2) I know there was one less game on the schedule, but this isn't exactly breaking news. They needed an extra feature in the can (besides the Harkes player retrospective -- come on guys, that looked thrown together). 3) A little tighter camera work would be nice. It would just give a little more intimate feel. 4) Okay, two weeks of Harkes glorification is enough. He is a solid, articulate analyst (even if he's still a little green and uncomfortable at times). Weelock is a very good broadcaster. There should be no more deferential treatment or acknowledgement of Harkes long career except in the sense of "John, you played with Etcheverry, what's his work rate like?" Use him, don't genuflect before him. Everybody watching knows who Mr. Captain for Life is. 5) The prepackaged stadium intros are great. Nice steal. 6) There's something quite obviously compressed about the ESPN game highlights. And it looks like it. MLS has the rights to the feed, can't somebody get the raw version? 7) Speaking of MLS rights, there should be some credit for ESPN. At a minimum, the Wynalda interviews post-game are ESPN work product.
I noticed Wheelock wasn't hunching over as much and, when he did, he quickly recovered. I'll take that as a victory for me, thank you. This week's was much better than the first week's. Although somebody has to do a better job of telling Harkes which camera is going to be on him when there's a one-shot.
Last week was good, this week was better. They're very smooth for this being the 2nd time working together. You know what I really like about Wheelock? Alot of guys in that position feed their analysts the answer in the question. "Starting Quaranta and Quinanilla up front, DC United is really young in the attack, aren't they?" What the hell kind of question is that?!?!? Sean slips up sometimes, but normally, he asks open-ended questions. What I like about Harkes is that he's not afraid to criticize, but he doesn't force "controversy" like some newbies do. He doesn't look and look for something to criticize. For example, DC's midfield play was not good, and he focused on that, and specifically noted, twice, that he didn't like how Kovalenko was used. But if you remember back to Wynalda and Chinaglia, they "forced" themselves to be controversial, and it came across as fake. This is off of the MLS Wrap topic, but the announcers for the DC-Chi game could not possibly have been worse.